(Charity Number: 26-254-7062)
Samasource derives its name from the Sanskrit word “sama”, which means “equal”.
Our Mission
Our Mission is to reduce poverty by connecting women, youth, and refugees to digital work.
Samasource enables marginalized people, from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, to receive life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. The core of this concept is microwork – little bits of labor that can be performed anytime and anywhere that add up to a real livelihood for our partners. In parallel, we enable socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the US to contribute to economic development by buying services from our workforce at fair prices.
Our Model
Our model has three parts. First, we screen and select Service Partners, locally-owned small businesses, non-profits, and groups of home-based workers, from the poorest parts of the world. Our Service Partners must satisfy stringent social impact and quality criteria that verify their contribution to economic development and their capacity to deliver good work. Next, we provide our Service Partners with free business training, using live sample projects, web-based tools, and site visits. Finally, we market our Service Partners’ services to paying clients through a website and sales team based in San Francisco. Our clients range from low-income entrepreneurs in Jersey City to mid-sized nonprofits, such as Benetech, and technology startups.
Our Work
To date, Samasource has contracted over $400,000 in paying work for over 600 marginalized people in nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and incubated a small business, the Women’s Digital League, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Our work in Haiti (first initiated in 2009), was accelerated after the earthquake in January 2010 when it became clear that providing work would become an important part of the country’s reconstruction. Today, Samasource has trained forty workers at 1000 Jobs/Haiti, our partner on the ground.
We’ve also recently launched a refugee work program in the Dabaab, Kenya, refugee camp, and released an award winning iPhone application called GiveWork that sends crowdsourced tasks to the people we train.
For more information please visit our site: www.samasource.org
